Category Archives: Music > Classical

Kaija Saariaho is a prominent member of a group of Finnish composers and performers who are now, in mid-career, making a worldwide impact.

As Master of the Queen’s Music, Judith Weir supports school music teachers, amateur orchestras and choirs, and rural festivals. She has written music for national and royal occasions, including the Queen’s 90th birthday celebrations and the UK’s official commemoration of the 1918 Armistice.

IFTA-nominee Anna Rice is fast emerging as a versatile and highly sought-after composer and orchestrator in the UK and Irish music industries. Equally at home in orchestral and electronic fields, she enjoys a varied career scoring both animation and live action, and a busy schedule as orchestrator and arranger for a number of renowned live and recording artists in Ireland and beyond.

Rich and powerful musical language and a strong sense of drama have made Scottish-American composer Thea Musgrave one of the most respected and exciting contemporary composers in the Western world.

Gubaidulina’s compositional interests have been stimulated by the tactile exploration and improvisation with rare Russian, Caucasian, and Asian folk and ritual instruments collected by the “Astreia” ensemble, of which she was a co-founder, by the rapid absorption and personalization of contemporary Western musical techniques (a characteristic, too, of other Soviet composers of the post-Stalin generation including Edison Denisov and Alfred Schnittke), and by a deep-rooted belief in the mystical properties of music.

Betsy Jolas has won many awards, including those of the Copley Foundation of Chicago, the American Academy of Arts and the Koussevitsky Foundation, becoming a member of the American Institute of Arts and Letters in 1983.

Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “seemingly boundless textural imagination” (NY Times) and “striking” (Guardian) sound world has made her “one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary music” (NPR).

Her works were performed with great success in the western world beginning in 1979. During the same year, she and her husband, the composer Dmitri Smirnov, were attacked by the Composers’ Union as “not worthy of the Soviet Union.” During the course of perestroika, Elena Firssova first received permission to travel abroad. There was no lasting change in Russian musical life, however, since the influence of the functionaries of the Composers’ Union remained strong. She founded the association ASM together with Edison Denissov and Dmitri Smirnov, which performed contemporary music with its own ensemble at home and abroad. In 1990 Elena Firssova moved to England with her family.
Elena Firsova has so far composed well over 100 works, including operas, cantatas, concertos, orchestral works but also much chamber music. She received a commission for a composition for Expo 2000. Her “Achmatova Requiem” received its world premiere at the Berlin Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt in September 2003.